When Chuck Lohre and Janet Groeber
learned the innovative kitchen at Hyde Park’s landmark 1960 Corbett
House was being replaced by new owners, they shifted into action to save
it. They offered to take it and the owners agreed.

They acquired the kitchen in 2010. Now,
no longer wanting to store the disassembled kitchen, they are trying to
find a new home for it. To help that quest, they have put one of the
kitchen’s most distinguished and visionary features on display through
Friday at the Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati (811 Race St.,
Downtown).

It is a 12-foot-long, mid-room “island”
that contains two custom-designed stainless-steel sinks, shelving for
spices and below-level warming lamp for food, deep fryer and more. From
6-8 p.m. Friday, Lohre will present a slide show/discussion on the house
and kitchen.

He is planning on having Everything But
the House auction the kitchen in March. But Cincinnati Art Museum also
is considering it as a future “period room” and hopes to determine the
feasibility of that this week, says its director, Aaron Betsky.

“We’re interested in a fascinating and
beautiful artifact and we’d love to keep it in Cincinnati one way or
another,” Betsky says. “We and others are working to see how that’s
possible.”

A decision is due this week. (It may have
been made by the time this story is published. If so, the online
version of this column will be updated.)

In Lohre’s view, the Corbett House is a critically important piece of the city’s Modernist legacy.

It was House Beautiful
magazine’s 1960 Pace Setter, featured in a cover article. The Grandin
Road house was designed in 1960 by John deKoven Hill, a key associate of
Frank Lloyd Wright who was an officer and trustee of the Wright
Foundation and also at one time editorial director of House Beautiful magazine. He died in 1996.

J. Ralph and Patricia Corbett were among
Cincinnati’s great 20th Century families. He was a founder of Nutone,
which made electrical door chimes, and he and his wife were major arts
supporters. They also entertained at home and wanted a residence
appropriate for that task. (He died in 1996; his wife in 2008.)

“The kitchen was the centerpiece that was
so incredible,” Lohre says. “(The house) is so significant because it’s
all unified inside and outside, grounds and interior. It was used
extensively for entertaining and became part of the culture of
Cincinnati because of Patricia Corbett.”

Lohre and his wife have a background in
preservation of Mid-Century Modernist architecture and design, an area
of growing importance in America. They live in Clifton’s Frank Lloyd
Wright-designed 1956 Boulter House and are active in Cincinnati Form
Follows Function, a group devoted to Modernism. Lohre also has a keen
interest in the “green” movement, running the green-cincinnati.com
website (where photos of the Corbett House kitchen are posted).

The Corbett House, when new, had to have
as modern and fully integrated a kitchen as the booming post-World War
II years allowed. It was approximately 15-by-25 feet. As the House Beautiful
article put it, “This kitchen has every convenience built in right at
hand, so you are free to concentrate on creative cooking, unhampered by
the usual clutter.”

The architect turned to Formica, a
Cincinnati company, to help design the light-blue, laminated plastic
surfaces of the kitchen, which had icons meant to be the home’s symbol.
And Nutone provided a built-in food center with mixer, blender,
shredder, grinder, sharpener and juicer, plus built-in hood fan,
intercom radio and clock chime.

Lohre, who paid the Corbett House
kitchen-renovation crew an extra $500 to remove the original as
carefully as possible, does not have the original refrigerator or two
dishwashers. They had been replaced over the years. A rolling table is
missing and it was difficult to disassemble some of the built-in wall
features.

Originally, Lohre thought he might
someday rebuild the Corbett kitchen in a new house — the “green” reuse
could qualify for LEED certification. The architect of their current
home, Wright, was not an advocate of big kitchens.

“I thought I owed it to give Janet a bigger kitchen than the last one, which has 30 square feet,” Lohre says.

But for now, maintaining a Wright home in
pristine condition is too important to give up. He’d like the Corbett
kitchen to also have a good home.